Re: The Vocabulary, Schema.org governance, etc.

On 19 September 2014 19:25, Guha <guha@google.com> wrote:

> First, a heartfelt thanks for caring and being so passionate about this. I
> am really happy that we are having an open discussion about these matters.
> In that spirit, here are a few comments.
>
> Schema.org does not claim or want to be *the* general web vocabulary. It
> is simply a vocabulary, that a set of groups within four large consumers of
> structured data on the web agree upon. I helped start schema.org because
> the fragmentation of vocabularies and confusion amongst webmasters was
> severely holding back adoption inside Google (Bing, Yahoo, Yandex) and
> consequently amongst webmasters. We figured that agreeing on the small
> subset of vocabulary that mattered to us would improve things a lot. It
> does seem to be working, but we constantly have to keep our focus and not
> stray into areas that are not of short/medium term focus for our companies.
> Indeed, we constantly find ourselves pulling back from more specialized
> areas. Having tried to build a "the" vocabulary once in Cyc, I am very wary
> of schema.org going down that road!
>
> Schema.org is evolving not just in its vocabulary, but also in its
> governance model. We solicit and accept input from the broad community both
> on vocabulary and on other issues. In fact, the recent change in our TOS
> was motivated by issues raised by the community. I fully expect that there
> will be a number of further changes in the years to come.
>
> Given the nature of web search and the effort expended by various 'search
> engine optimizers' in gaming search algorithms, we are unfortunately unable
> to discuss the details of our data processing. We welcome other consumers
> of this data and maybe some of them can be more explicit about how they use
> the data. I am very hopeful that there will be academic research projects
> that consume schema.org data in new applications. That will pave the path
> towards a well understood, documented model for consuming this data.
>
> We encourage the creation of many vocabularies. We would love for there to
> be other vocabularies that get lots of adoption and as these vocabularies
> get adoption, the search engines will use them.
>
> Thank you for being so understanding of our situation.
>

+1

I see these as significant positive developments, that personally make me
more likely to reuse this work.  Please keep it up!

>
>
> Guha
>